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Awesome Ron

Ron Paul

The president of the Columbia College Libertarians, Mathieu Gordon, Class of 2008, says that he has watched dozens of video clips featuring the antiwar Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Gordon has so deeply absorbed Paul’s message of non-intervention that he has decided not to contribute to Paul’s campaign. “You don’t really have the right to get involved in another country’s politics,” Gordon, who is British, said at a club meeting last week, after Paul’s supporters raised four million dollars in a single day, surpassing Mitt Romney’s record. “I suppose I should really support Hillary Clinton, because she’ll impose loads of taxes and all the businesses will come to London.”

It was fall break, and there were six libertarians in attendance, down from the usual ten. All were men, and all had seen the movie “V for Vendetta,” in which the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day figures prominently. Fawkes, a Catholic rebel who tried to assassinate King James I in 1605, has become an unlikely inspiration for Ron Paul fans, who used the recent anniversary of Fawkes’s failed attempt at terrorism to stage their one-day fund-raising blitz—a “money bomb,” according to the organizers’ Web site, ThisNovember5th.com. “It gets quite confusing,” Gordon said. “On a date that’s meant to be anti the guy who’s anti-Parliament, the idea here is to be giving money to someone who’s anti-Parliament.”

“The important part is that it worked,” Russell Whitaker, a junior and a biochemistry major, said. Whitaker was wearing a black “Ron Paul Revolution” sweatshirt, and showed off his copy of Paul’s book “Freedom Under Siege: the U.S. Constitution after 200-plus Years,” which was signed by Paul in 1988 (“back when he had black hair”) and again last month, at a party on West Twenty-ninth Street. On another night, the libertarians—who fancy themselves a kind of informal debating society—might have been discussing the gold standard and the Federal Reserve, or the differences between the Chicago and the Austrian schools of economics, but the primary topic of this meeting was, as a physics grad student who was wearing suspenders put it, “Why is Ron Paul awesome?” They compared notes on favorite YouTube videos: the Bill Maher interview, the dorm-room guy, the stripper girl (“Oh, yeah, everybody’s seen her”), the “Morton Downey Jr. Show.” To help make the case for awesomeness, among the fellow-travellers cited were Dennis Kucinich, Ayn Rand, Howard Dean, Barry Goldwater, Eugene V. Debs, Ronald Reagan, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert A. Heinlein.

“The thing about Ron Paul is, there is nothing spectacular about Ron Paul the man,” Adam Sparks, a bearded senior, said. “He’s the most boring little old man from Texas who has these laughs that make him look like a Muppet sometimes.” He added, “I was completely politically apathetic before Ron Paul.” Sparks is the founder of a Facebook group, Columbians for Ron Paul. “I don’t know why people can’t rally behind someone who actually does want to lower your taxes,” he said.

Unlike most college students, Whitaker, who is forty-one, is a full-time wage earner, and therefore a real taxpayer. He works as a software engineer at Google, in addition to his coursework. “I’m a Navy veteran myself and I think that war sucks,” he said. He considers himself an anarcho-capitalist, although he recently registered as a Republican, so that he could cast a ballot—his first—for Paul in the New York primary next year. “It’s a historical event in my life, but I didn’t really want to go and hang out with Republicans,” Whitaker said. “They’re a little bit too starched and old-boy network for me.” He has been known on occasion to socialize with Hillary Clinton supporters.

“If Ron Paul doesn’t win, the only way to solve this ever-increasing spiral of government involvement is to start a new nation and put even stricter checks and balances in place,” Sparks said.

“Except you can’t go west any farther,” Gordon said.

“NASA’s starting a moon base in 2020,” Sparks said. “We can have a three-man country.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.